Saturday is historically the worst day of the week to read the newspaper. And yet here’s this morning’s Tuscaloosa News bucking trends. Two front-page stories I need to quote from.
First up is an AP article: “Lyon out as chief justice candidate”:
Democrats removed perennial candidate Harry Lyon as their nominee for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court on Friday, deciding he was unfit after he made disparaging remarks about homosexuals, his Republican opponent and party leaders.
That’s the lede. What’s funny about it is that this guy Lyon had already once before been removed from the party’s ballot (in 1994, in the governor’s race) for violating party rules. And so maybe everyone deserves a second chance. Lyon, though,
has referred to homosexuals as “freaks” in online posts and once suggesting killing a few illegal immigrants to scare others away from Alabama. He has been disciplined three times by the Alabama State Bar, including once for pointing a shotgun at a neighbor and her children.
Were any of these embarrassments grounds for removal? No. The Democrats removed him only after some recent rambling presentation where he disparaged other state legislators. What this means is that in Alabama, and within the Democratic Party of Alabama, you can have a pretty steady career despite being a known and total psychopath. A total psychopath who looks like some horrible union of Paul Bryant, Ned Flanders, and Shelley Winters.
Next up is the conclusion of a story that must have gone viral in places, about the search for real-life meth cooker Walter White, who coincidentally shares a name with Bryan Cranston’s character on Breaking Bad. Here’s a bang-up graf from a T News staff report on the story:
“I don’t know anything about the TV show,” [Sgt. Andy] Norris said, noting that he only recognized “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston, who plays the fictional White, as the dad from “Malcolm in the Middle” and a 1996 JCPenney commercial.
!!!
(Incidentally, Cranston’s also mildly famous for playing Jew-convert dentist Tim Whatley on Seinfeld. Did any other viewers of the otherwise brilliant The Campaign find it weird that they named Dylan McDermott’s character Tim Wattley?)
Say what you want about the South, or the state of the press in the 21st century, but The Tuscaloosa News is a great paper I’m happy to subscribe to. Linden High, the Black Belt school that last year had to pay the all-white owners of its football field $1000 a game just to use it, now gets to pay the same as nearby (all-white) Marengo Academy. The Tuscaloosa News doesn’t take the credit for making this happen, but given its outstanding coverage of the scandal last year, I think it ought to.